This is a blog viewing the world, politics, social interactions, spiritual quests, and the pathless Way from a Buddhist-Progressive-Psychological perspective.
ZEN MASTER LINJI'S WARNING:
"Followers of the Way, do not seek for anything in written words. You will tire your heart and inhale icy air without profit."
George Carlin's Warning:
"The owners of this country know the truth: its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Delusions About God Don't Make God a Delusion

Two blogs this week bring up the question of God which inspired me to
respond. One is from an ex-Pentacostal preacher about
his conversion experience and in particular reports his conversion experience as
a believer in God who was converted to the belief in atheism. The other is a
blog by Lawrence Grecco who
writes about three common mistaken beliefs about Buddha Dharma including the
belief that Buddhists are atheists.

Let’s look at Venerable Grecco’s
piece first. His blog post is titled, “Three Myths about Buddhism that Drive People away in Droves.”The three
misunderstandings are (1) Buddhists believe that "life is suffering", (2) Karma is a
bitch, and (3) Buddhists don’t believe in God or prayer.For Buddha Dharma to be transplanted and acculturated in the
West, it is essential that followers of the Buddha Dharma are able to address these
three concerns cogently without dodging the nuances and complexities of these issues.Rather than taking up space to summarize his points
here, I suggest just following the link and reading it there. Here’s my response, somewhat edited from what
I posted there.

Good points to consider. I agree that these are the three
misunderstandings or misinterpretations (we could even call them delusions)
that usually come up in discussion with those who have no personal experience
of Buddha Dharma. And even some people who have had relatively closer contact with Buddha Dharma than most are still clueless when it comes to karma.

Before I discuss the three points, I would like to pick a nit over the use of the word “myth”
which is being used in the pejorative sense meaning “falsehood” that is derived
from the overly rationalistic world view of materialist scientism.As the greatest master of psychology of the
20th century, Carl G. Jung, made clear in his voluminous studies, and
also attested to by the preeminent mythologist Joseph Campbell, the word “myth” is
a word that connects us to the sacred realm of life and living.Only a materialist is blind to the psychic
reality of myth even though there is no particular physical reality.To equate the word “myth” with "falsehood"
would itself be saying that the myths of Buddha Dharma (as portrayed in the
Mahayana Sutras especially and exuberantly but also in a more limited extent in
the Pali Suttas) are falsehoods. This is the great mistake of those who claim to support Buddha Dharma but who advocate "naturalizing" Buddha Dharma to take out the mythic qualities. Myths, including the myths of Buddha Dharma, are not falsehoods. They are myths that
speak the truth of the mind, not the facts of physical perception.

Life As Suffering:

The false thinking that Buddhism
teaches “life is suffering” is definitely the main point that people can get
stuck on. Ven. Grecco has hit the target on dukkha meaning an off-center hub that
turns with disturbance and it's opposite sukkha meaning the ease with which an in-balance or
centered hub turns.I like to remind
people that the root of the word “passion” means suffering, as in the Passion of
Christ, so the First Noble Truth that "Life is Passion" is completely in line
with the role that suffering as passion plays in Christianity. The Buddha saying “Life is passion,” is exactly
what the Christian myth is saying when it says the Son of God was born into
this world of passion and had to personally live this world’s suffering as a
person not as a God. The difference between Buddha Dharma and Christianity on this point is that instead of saying that there was only one Son of God who experienced "Life is passionate suffering", Buddha Dharma teaches us that each and every one of us is a Child of God and it is only our own ignorance, craving, and mistaken attachments that prevent us from realizing it on our own.

The extension of this mistake about
the First Noble Truth is the belief that the Third Noble Truth of the "Extinction of
Dukkha" means taking a nihilistic view.Buddha
Dharma is the middle path between eternalism (i.e., an eternal life in a heaven) and nihilism (nothingness), both of which in their way posit
a materialist universe. Buddha Dharma does not posit a materialist universe so
there is no basis for a belief in either eternalism or nihilism in the Buddha
Dharma.Karma:The misunderstandings about karma
are hard to break through because karma is so complex that the Buddha often did not
want to discuss it for fear of confusing his audience. The Buddha acknowledged and affirmed the activity
of karma, but he revolutionized the interpretation of karma as it was being
discussed in his time. Unfortunately, today people mistake the pre-Buddhist,
i.e., the non-Buddhist, view of karma to be the Buddhist view of karma, and they
are completely ignorant about how the Buddha saw through those misinterpretations
of karma.The commonly conventional view
of karma is like saying that inheritance is a matter of “blood” while ignoring
that it is really a matter of genetics. To understand the workings of karma is
even more complex than understanding the workings of genes and chromosomes. As Ven. Grecco says, karma is not about
“deserving” or “retribution” in the judicial sense. There is absolutely no
judging in the function of karma.If I
step off a cliff, there is no judgment in the result when I hit the ground.
There is just the degree of pain or injury, up to death, depending on the
height of the fall. When something happens to us,
the Buddha taught that there may be a karmic aspect to the causal influences leading up to the
occurrence but that karma is not ever the sole causative force.If we are astute, then we may be able to
perceive the karmic aspect, but it is not always necessary. To take the example from Ven. Grecco, for instance,
someone may think, “If you slip on a
banana peel and fall down on your face, it’s because you insulted me last
night.”That is such a speculative over
simplification that is amounts to plain stupidity.However, there may be a seed of truth in it
because the inattentive attitude, about how one is relating to others and the
world, that one had the night before and which led to insulting someone could actually
be an important condition that continued through the next morning as
inattention to where the person is walking and not seeing the banana peel.That is, if we don’t watch where we step in
our relationships with people and we insult them, then for sure it is not unlikely that
likewise we won’t watch where we step when walking down the street. The karma of "not
watching where we step" with the actions of our tongue or our feet can be the connecting karmic
principle. But again, that has nothing to do with “divine punishment.”It just has to do with our own actions and our attention
or inattention.

Similarly, if we speculate “Perhaps that person begging for change on the
street was Hitler in a past life, so it serves them right.” that
is only our ego's self-serving rationalization that has absolutely nothing to do with
an accurate analysis of karma.If one
analyzes the context, then it is infinitely more probable that the karma of the
person begging on the street is due to his or her having previously (in the past
of this life or another) met a beggar on the street and had just that exact thought that the
beggar “deserved” that fate.That is how
karma works; it is a balancing mechanism that corrects the dualistic views in
our relationships with others and the world.If we walk past a beggar and blame the beggar for deserving his or her
condition, then we are relating to the beggar dualistically, instead of saying
“there but for fortune go I.”If we walk
past a beggar and blame the beggar for deserving his or her condition, then the
karma that is most likely to flow from that action of ours is that sooner or
later we will switch places to walk in the other’s shoes and see from first
hand experience how that feels.

God:The mistake about how Buddha Dharma relates to ideas of God is also one
fraught with nuance that most people want to avoid because judgment of good and
bad is so much easier within our mental conditioning.The most important nuance is found in the question
of whether or not it is beneficial to conceive of God as a being or a thing. If
someone believes in a God, then Buddha Dharma won’t argue with the person
because the person’s belief is exactly what defines their notion of God.This is how we can say that some people
believe in money as belief in a God.When someone says, “There is no God but God.” then that comes closer to
the Buddha Dharma because it points to the truth that God is not able to be
grasped by notions that objectify God as a person or thing.

The theism of the Buddha Dharma has been most closely related to the term
"panentheism" (not "pantheism").There is a very interesting
chapter called “The God-Conception in Buddhism” in the book Zen For Americansby
Soyen Shaku written over 100 years
ago In this essay, Reverend Shaku says,

“At the outset, let me state that Buddhism is not atheistic as the term is
ordinarily understood. It has certainly a God, the highest reality and truth,
through which and in which this universe exists. However, the followers of
Buddhism usually avoid the term God, for it savors so much of Christianity,
whose spirit is not always exactly in accord with the Buddhist interpretation
of religious experience.” (p 25-26)

The spirit he is referring to is the spirit of objectifying God as a person,
supreme being, or creator and attaching anthropomorphic images of God as a separate entity.In Buddha
Dharma there are many words that are the equivalent of the term “God” such as
Dharmakaya, Shunyata, Tathagata, True Suchness, the Unborn, etc.However, the Lankavatara Sutra teaches that
the Tahtagata is inconceivable, so the multitude of names such as “God,” “Lord,” “Creator,” etc. are just names all pointing to the same reality.To know that the name is just a name doesn’t
mean that the name doesn’t really point to reality. If one wants to truly know
that which is designated by a name such as “God” then one has to stop grasping
at the name and turn one’s awareness toward what the name is pointing at. When
we turn our awareness around from our belief in the discrimination of
objectified external things toward the unified principle at the root of our own
mind, then it no longer matters whether we call the fountainhead of our
awareness by the name of Tahtagata, Buddha, or God. When Carl Jung was asked about whether he believed in God he said, “I don’t
believe. I know.”That is the whole point
of Buddha Dharma.Don’t talk about
believing or not, but instead do what it takes to inquire on one’s own to know
on one’s own. The central clue we only need to remember is that as long as we
objectify God as a separate person or thing, then we are still in the realm of
belief and not knowing. _/|\_

This story by Jerry Dewitt is a classic story of conversion. Sometimes the
conversion is from not believing in God to believing in God. Here the
conversion is from believing in God to not believing in God. It is just a
story of turning from belief in one delusion to belief in another. It
doesn't matter which direction the turning goes.

The word "conversion" means to convert, "to turn
with." It means turning from one belief to another. The
interesting thing about conversion is the emotional aspect. We bind up a raft load of
emotions in our belief systems, some of them conscious but mostly unconscious, and when we let go of a belief system we experience an overflow of free
flowing emotional energy in our body and mind. Then when we latch onto the
new belief system the flooding emotions become anchored in the new patterns of thought and feeling, and we feel a tremendous relief. Then we take that feeling of relief
as the self-fulfilling evidence confirming that the new belief is the real truth. Sadly, the relief and excitement of conversion is not proof of anything
other than that a genuine conversion took place. It is not proof of the new beliefs
to which we have been converted. But new converts always take the emotions to be such proof. With the belief in God and the belief in atheism, there is truth and delusion on both sides. The belief in an anthropomorphic image of God
is no more or less of a delusion than the belief that there is no God.
The truth found in the belief in God is that "God is," but the delusion is that God is
an anthropomorphic being or a thing. The truth found in atheism is that there is
no possible image that accurately portrays God, and the delusion of atheism is the
conclusion that because there is no conceivable image of God that there is no
God. Rather than mistaking conversion as something real, we should know that
converting from one belief system to another is not the answer. It doesn't
matter which direction the conversion goes: from theism of one kind to theism of another kind, from theism to atheism, or from
atheism to theism. The conversion is nothing bur the switch from one belief
system to another. The actual truth of God can only be found in the space
between belief systems, can only be realized in the brief time within conversion when our beliefs
are not fixed and polarized in either system and our mind has the freedom of
its own awareness unencumbered by belief systems. This returning to our true state is called reversion. In the Sanskrit
language it is called paravrtti.
It is the remembrance of our true home, our actual birthright as aware
human beings, and it has nothing to do with beliefs or with philosophical arguments or
assertions about whether a God exists or does not exist. When we turn the
light of awareness around to see the fountainhead of our own mind, then we can
experience God on our own and not have to worry about belief any more, because
then we know.
_/|\_

5 comments:

In terms of the first noble truth, I think if we see the Buddha was talking about experience, then it is fair to say that all experience is disappointing - even pleasure fails to satisfy. A close look at the ideas suggests that loka (our experiential world) is equated with dukkha, and both are equated with the khandhas (or apparatus of experience). As the Dhammapada says sabbe sankhārā dukkhā. All the constructs that make up experience (all the occurrences of sense object meeting sense faculty and bringing about sense cognition) are disappointing. In crude terms life is suffering because even pleasure always disappoints (by ending).

With respect to karma the Buddha mainly describes it as a mechanism which decides our afterlife destination (sugati or duggati - paralleling sukha and dukkha). Though there is always the potential for karma to ripen in this life as well, or it would have limited moral force. In the present, karma determined our human birth and nothing much else. karma is partly complex because the doctrine itself changes. Overall we deny the metaphysical agent and judgement upon them. But when it is pedagogically pertinent the texts all talk about us in future and past lives as if it is just us - I think some sense of connection with future lives is necessary for karma to have moral force. Of course karma is not the only force on our present experience. But if we are to consider our actions and their consequences we must believe that we personally will live those consequences otherwise it is too abstract to have moral force. I would argue that for most Westerners karma has no moral force - we are not good because we fear a bad rebirth. We are good because it seems logical to us to be so. Which is not traditional Buddhism.

I particularly love the way Buddhists talk about god. As soon as the subject comes up we retreat into theory. We don't believe in god in theory. But in practice all around the Buddhist world people are praying to Buddha for the welfare of a loved one, a better rebirth in the future, relief from various oppressions etc. For all intents and purposes outside the West, Buddha is a god (notice that traditional Buddhists tend to drop the definite article that we insist on). But we in the West have to carefully distinguish ourselves from theism because it is what we are all reacting against - virtually all Western Buddhists were raised as Theists or atheists of the Western kind.

Where I do agree is on the value of myth.

So I would see the "three basic mistakes" are three ways in which Western Buddhists are seeking to distance themselves from traditional Buddhism as practised in Buddhist countries. Buddhism of that kind is unsettling to post-Christian converts. Whether we are able to engage in the mythos of Buddhism under these conditions remains to be seen.

"If we walk past a beggar and blame the beggar for deserving his or her condition, then the karma that is most likely to flow from that action of ours is that sooner or later we will switch places to walk in the other’s shoes and see from first hand experience how that feels."

Dear Anonymous, it is easy to hide behind anonymity. Yes, it is simplification which is what "most likely" is saying. The "over" in oversimplification and any "delusion" are in your own mind. Read the Suttas and Sutras and you will see that this is not any different from the simplification that the Buddha used in order to convey the meaning without getting confused by the complexity. When teaching elementary levels we have to use elementary language. For example, read the Cula-suññata Sutta: The Lesser Discourse on Emptiness. MN 121 http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.121.than.html